Government Treated Peaceful Boycott As Terrorism

The Partnership for Civil Justice (a public interest legal organization which the Washington Post called “the constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation”) reported this week that the Obama administration treated a peaceful boycott as a terrorist threat:

4,000 pages [of documents] obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund [through Freedom of Information Act requests] reveal that Fusion Centers and their personnel even conflate their anti-terrorism mission with a need for intelligence gathering on a possible consumer boycott during the holiday season. There are multiple documents from across the country referencing concerns about negative impacts on retail sales.

The Executive Director of the Intelligence Fusion Division, also the Joint Terrorism Task Force Director, for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department circulated a 30-page report tracking the Occupy Movement in towns and cities across the country created by the trade association the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

He directed that the recipients of the document, who included top staff at the Washington, D.C. Fusion Center, “develop a one page product that we can send to our District Commanders to make them aware of the potential threat.”

The Executive Director of the Intelligence Fusion Division, also the Joint Terrorism Task Force Director, for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department instructs D.C Fusion Center regarding the “potential threat” of the Black Friday BoycottPage 7 of an International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) report on Occupy’s planned Black Friday Boycott, circulated through counter-terrorism officialsPage 18 of an International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) report on Occupy’s planned Black Friday Boycott, circulated through counter-terrorism officials

The ICSC report detailing Occupy Black Friday “threats” includes images of “Sample Anti-Black Friday Icons and Posters” with slogans urging people to “buy local” or “do your shopping at a small independent merchant.” The report identifies among “Specific Known Threats” “buy nothing day tactics which might be used by Occupy and other protesters” including credit card cut ups, free non-commercial street parties, and alternative mass green transport activities.

Additional “Specific Known Threats” in the report are identified by individual Occupy locations from Occupy Bee Cave, Texas (“Assessment … Aim: to educate how military spending has affected the economy – consistent with anti-war agenda of the group”) to Occupy Seattle (“Assessment … leafleting likely in order to draw attention”).

The intelligence reporting and communications apparatus was in full throttle over potential Occupy Black Friday boycotts. One sample document issued from the Baltimore police shows a distribution list ranging from the Maryland Fusion Center, the FBI, the DHS, the Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network, the Secret Service, the NYPD and other city and state law enforcement, the manager of corporate security for an energy company, university personnel, and the Federal Reserve.

The “counter-terrorism” documents contain multiple references to Black Friday boycotts as well as potential negative impacts on retails sales.

PCJF Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard stated: “It is outrageous that counter-terrorism officials used their anti-terrorism authority and funding to “protect” corporate America from a consumer boycott. It is well past time that the vast flow of tax-payer money to the Fusion Centers be ended.”

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I'm one of the people who boycotted the Christmas season. Fuck you government, you can't make me conduct commerce if I don't choose to. Reap the whirlwind of being fascist traitors. Those who support you (corporations) get to suffer the consequences of their complicity.

We noticed that, based on your declared income level, you did not participate fully in the recent Holiday season.

It is recommended that you spend the equivalent of 5% of gross declared income, 50% of which shall be new debt. In such a way your local and state thieves and the national banksters may be adequately provided for.

Since you did not more fully participate, we have deducted from you bank account $143.88, the equivalent in sales taxes that you would have paid and forwarded to the appropriate local and state thieves. Additionally, we have increased the balances on your 3 credit cards a total of $1,789.78 so as to benefit the banksters.

If you think that these actions are in error, please visit our local office in Nome, Alaska with 11 years of all related documents you posses, which, of course, will not be the correct ones. We will, as always, find against you, but the enjoyment in doing so will bring much delight to our criminal and mundane live.

What's really interesting and alarming is the depth to which corporate and state power is now intermingled. And that nobody in the state security apparatus sees anything at all odd about it. It's accepted without question among these people that anyone who doesn't want to max out their available credit at a chain store buying plastic shit made by Chinese slaves is a threat to National Security. There are corporations building crime labs and making them available to law enforcement, hiring Secret Service as internal Security personnel, and vice versa. In return, they expect any inconvenience to their practices to be treated as a terrorist threat, and the Security apparatus eagerly obliges.

There's no distinction between spooks and mall cops. It's not just that they have the same objectives; they're the same people.

It goes the other way too. The "Alphabet Soup" agencies hire private corporations to do the things government is prohibited from doing. It's 100% true that the NSA isn't reading everybody's e-mail or recording their phone conversations. Edward Snowden worked for Booz/Allen/Hamilton when he did that, not the NSA. So the NSA hasn't violated their legal and Constitutional constraints, see? No doubt all the legal paperwork is in order, by which the NSA files a FISA Court motion to get approval to access extremely specific requests for information Booz/Allen/Hamilton might happen to have. How did they know how to be that specific, one wonders? Sorry, that's classified, of course, for reasons of National Security. This is why the first serious thing the US "Provisional Authority" in Iraq did was rewrite Iraqi law to very specifically exclude anything Blackwater mercenaries did. US uniformed forces could follow whatever rules they had to, and the dirty work was done by "Private Contractors," and the law explicitly shielded private corporate employees, so it was all perfectly above-board.

This is Fascism, in the classical, textbook-definition sense. Fascism isn't about snazzy uniforms, marching around, shouting, and putting human beings into ovens. That can be part of it, but it doesn't have to be, and it never starts that way. The merger of corporate and state power is now seamless. The costs are mostly put on the public ledger, while the profits are privatized.

Someday I'll come home and find my house being looted, my pets killed, and I'll be tased and beaten to within an inch of my life. But it will all be OK, see, because it wasn't the cops or spies or burglars. It was contractors working for FriendlyCorp, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it, see, because they were contracted by the XYZ Agency, and the contract between explicitly shielded any of them from any liability, so it's all perfectly legal and no laws broken or even badly bent. If I'd like to file a complaint, that's fine, too. I have to sign the non-disclosure agreement committing to binding private arbitration, I waive the right to see any evidence or hear any eplanations for anything, and I'll hear the results in a prompt and timely manner. All agents are currently assisting other guests; your wait time will be approximately...17.2 years. Your call is very important to us.

Actually it won't and here's why: large systems of control, fencing & supplying resources, are in place for those ubercorporations that are the Overlords.The rest of the slaves are meant to scrap by design for the dregs because it makes them stronger and/or needier slaves, more obedient. Some slaves are then chosen (stronger) to use force on the other slaves (needier but not yet obedient).

Our entire intelligence and law enforcement operations are constrained and encouraged to chase their own tail like an addle brained dog.

How? By the oligarchs continually issuing orders to "sick 'em".

The clincher was when the FBI director said their primary purpose was no longer law enforcement but, instead, terrorism.

As wealth becomes more singular it becomes more insular. Who will stop them, enforce the laws, convict crimminals while we chase our tails, phantoms and have wars on concepts like terror, insurgents, dangerous citizens?

Incorrect. That strategy requires less corporations & more expanse on useless government spending by trying to spread it to thin.This is the opposite: corporations expand into government, into making law & enforcing it, and punish you for not feeding their corporate coffers.

"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!"

The trajectoy for an ugly outcome to restore liberty increases every day. Of course the main cause of how we got here is also a solid quote from Jefferson:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

The private Central Banking cartel created by Mayer Amschel Rothschild that now owns governments worldwide (including the USA) had this to say:

""Give me control of a nation's moneyand I care not who makes the laws."

If a revolution begins in America don't expect to just face off against American security forces, expect foreign armies as well. A consistent theme throughout history. Hopefully, it never comes to this especially because the bloodshed won't remain localized to just the USA.

I have no doubt that ZH community members are considered terrorists. Especially the ones that tell the truth about how big a bags a shit those mother fuckers at US counter intelligence and anti-torrorism agencies are.

It's like calling somebody racist because they think that Obama has enacted, enabled or otherwise encouraged piss poor policy. The label ceases to have the negative meaning that people are so scared of. I have blood relatives who have darker skin than Obama, and does anybody believe that I think any less of them because of that? If all that is needed for me to be "racist" is to disagree with a policy or an action of Obama, then sign me up. I'm a fucking racist. I'll wear that shit like a badge of honor. I will not, however, stoop to hating a person for the mere fact that their skin is brown or black.

Likewise with the terrorist label. If your actions and/or beliefs do not mesh with how they think the world ought to be, they're going to be looking for any way they can to label you a terrorist. If they want to put that label upon me, I say fuck them, I'll wear that shit like a badge of honor too. I'm a fucking terrorist, whoopdy fucking doo! I will not, however, use violence or the threat of violence against civilians in order to achieve a religious, political or otherwise ideological goal.

It's far worse: the US admin (Obama, Bush, whoever will follow) must call everyone else a terrorist because the facts show they are in fact the nerve-gas deploying, drone-striking, child-murdering & drug-dealing terrorists.The #1 terrorist in the world is the USA & #2 is Israel.

Newspeak is bullshit on purpose. It robs words of their meanings, so people can no longer express incongruous thoughts. When everyone is a "terrorist," then nobody is actually a "terrorist," and the word has no meaning.

My work puts me in the way of a lot of corporate communications. Bullshit is an art form in the corporate world. Many words mean the opposite of what you and I might think they mean. "Accountability," for instance, means something much more like, "Under no circumstances am I going to take the blame." "Transparency" means, "You'll never be able to figure out what the fuck we're up to here."

They could be spending their time and energy finding pedophiles, rapists, meth cookers/dealers, muggers, gangsters....but oh no...a much bigger threat is young people protesting materialism and the bankster debt Ponzi.

Finding?! They already know where most of those people are: catch & release!If they actually cleaned up the streets they'd be out of a job faster than you can believe.They have zero incentive to do this. The only support they even get from the sheeple of the public at large is from the fear of the released meth cooks, rapists & pedophiles.

Even better!! My PC has no camera or microphone. I could plug those in but I'd have no use for them so there is no such thing. ULTRA-terrorist!

Permanent no-knock warrant with required use of NSA-provided laptop that can only connect first to NSA data-centers & fingerprint/DNA-key opened to ensure it's me and cameras & microphone can't ever be turned off.For user convenience the biometric key sensors will not be in the laptop itself but in the slave-collar that will be required wearing around the neck at all times.

Exactly. They are fucking cowards. They're brave and tough when they can come in with overwhelming force, but I guarantee that most of them will turn tail and run when they cannot simply overwhelm their foe. It's brute force thug tactics with no thought behind it. It's the "HULK SMASH" attitude, except, unlike the green comic book hero, they're in the wrong and their power is limited by a lot more than just how angry they are.

Oh no, 'american' citizen, 'peacably' will mean 'bowing down with pepperspray in your eyes' and 'assemble' will mean 'behind bars or under boots'.See? Your precious citizenism has been 'protected and respected'!

We should not be surprised at the grotesque waste, mission creep and abuses of power given how much the federal and several state governments have totally wasted trying to get ObamaCare(tm) web sites running.

One of the main roots of such utter foolishness is the ease with which government can create almost unlimited amounts of money out of thin air. Near-infinite money buys near-infinite government, and a bureaucracy that is generously can entertain its fantasy dreams about how it can expand its power and control over its realm.

Every day more people are coming to the judgment that a carefully organized effort to repair the constitution via the States' power to propose and ratify amendments has less risk to our liberty and prosperity than the present trajectory of the federal government and especially the federal bureaucracy. The first order of business of an Article V Convention must be to limit government's ability to spend and create near-infinite amounts of money.